Yeah, that should be a big surprise…
Duolingo announced Swahili in beta recently. It still doesn’t have sound, but they’re working on it. The text is supposedly complete though, but errors are to be expected at this stage, and some alternative correct translations may not be recognized. Anyway, my natural curiosity made me check it out.
Good news first: It uses plain Latin alphabet, the same letters as in English, no extra letters, not even accents and umlauts so far at least. The pronunciation is much more regular than in English, you can basically read the words out loud even if you have never seen them before. And for the most part the language has simple syllables without long strings of consonants that you see in some Slavic languages and to a lesser degree some Nordic languages. Some of the most common words are even made by duplicating simple syllables: “Mimi” = I, “wewe” = you etc.
Bad news: The vocabulary and grammar is different from anything I have ever heard before. And because of the distance (I live in Norway) I don’t even know it from songs or movies. (Except Baba Yetu, the team song from Civilization 4.) As I said elsewhere, they don’t make anime in East Africa. Perhaps they should, but they are kind of busy staying alive and getting out of poverty right now, so it may take some time before they can start projecting their culture worldwide, I guess.
It is now my third night with the new language. I mostly got the “intro” 10-point module that I did a few times the first night and repeated last night. The next, Greetings 1 of 4, I did a couple times last night and it was blank now. I recognized most of the words but had no idea what they meant, which was pretty much the same thing I experienced with the first lesson yesterday. So presumably a day from now I may actually remember this too, or most of it. Still, it is pretty disconcerting to stare at words I knew 24 hours ago and not have a clue what they mean. If I live long enough, I suppose this will happen to English too, but that’s a different story. Luckily being bilingual does give some protection against dementia, so says the science. Hopefully not an issue for a good long while, but at least now I have an idea of how it must feel.
There isn’t any real reason why I should learn Swahili. I hope to never go to East Africa, and I would prefer if East Africa did not need to come here either. That said, I had a bunch of obvious East African guys living upstairs less than two years ago. I don’t know if they spoke Swahili, probably not among themselves as it seems to be more of a lingua franca, a language that is adopted as a common language between speakers whose native languages are different. Anyway, for now I am just curious. The language seems approximately as hard as Turkish, not easy like French or unreachable like Hebrew. It may take a few more days to make sure.